Fighting Back Against Anti-“Woke” Censorship

For more than two and a half years, a 47-year-old Black woman, Tracy McCarter, sat in a cell at Rikers Island in New York City, awaiting news about whether she would go on trial for the murder of her ex-husband, James Murray. Despite a record of abuse at the hands of Murray and her viable claims of having to defend herself on the night her ex-husband died, Tracy was up against a criminal legal system that punishes Black women and gender-expansive people who survive domestic and intimate partner violence.

Unable to claim self-defense in a legal system hellbent on criminalizing Black people and incapable of seeing Black women as victims, Tracy’s nearly three-year battle to have charges dismissed contended with a troubling history of Black women surviving violence and being punished for it. Black women are hardly ever perceived as battered women in fear of their lives. It is usually left to them and other Black women to amplify their stories, demand accountability, and care when they are harmed. And as lonely as that work can be, they endure because Tracy and other criminalized survivors deserve better.

To understand why the U.S. criminal legal system treats Black women survivors like Tracy so poorly, it helps to have tools to see how the criminal legal system disparately addresses violence against Black women. And there is a tool that offers critical insight into how and why the criminal legal system continuously fails Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people: intersectionality. Coined and conceptualized by Kimberlé Crenshaw between 1989 and 1991 to explain how the law and juridical processes operate in the lives of racially minoritized women, intersectionality is an important theory of power and difference. It is also misunderstood and maligned — and more recently under attack by elected and appointed officials and self-identified anti-“woke” pundits, activists, and advocates. Intersectionality is one of many theories, concepts, and ideas that help us articulate what injustice and marginalization are. In a society in which inequities are widespread, we need every tool possible to combat anti-“woke” censorship.

The fight to rid our curricula, our policymaking, or our institution-building of this and other liberatory tools is in full swing. And many people are fighting back. African American Forum Policy has called for a Freedom to Learn National Day of Action on May 3, to “defend the truth and protect the freedom to learn.” This day of action responds to an increasingly hostile and coordinated effort to prevent the effective education of our students.

In April 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida signed House Bill (HB) 7, more commonly known as the “Anti-Woke Bill.” DeSantis claimed that this bill “would give businesses, employees, children and families tools to stand up against…woke indoctrination.” Furthermore, he touted this bill as taking on “both corporate wokeness and Critical Race Theory in schools.” When pressed to define woke before a judge, DeSantis’ general counsel, Ryan Newman, defined woke as “the belief that there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” Intriguingly, this definition is quite accurate. DeSantis openly opposes schools or corporations discussing and addressing systemic injustices. In January 2023, DeSantis went even further in his anti-Black Studies agenda and prohibited an AP African American Studies course from being taught in public schools in Florida. Much of the work of Black feminism is calling out and eradicating injustices. His bills do not name Black feminism, but they do attack tools, theories, and movements created and supported by Black women.

One need only look to state legislatures working overtime to erase Black feminist contributions from K-12 and higher education curricula to see the power (actualized and potential) these words and movements carry. In Ohio, the state in which I reside, Republican senators have proposed Senate Bill 83, which would end diversity and inclusion training requirements and seek restrictions on and prohibitions of gender and ethnic studies curricula. Effectively, this bill could make it nearly impossible to do my job as a tenured professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies who focuses on Black feminisms, African American history, and the history of U.S. social movements.

Black feminist ideas, theories, concepts, and expressions help to build a just, peaceful, and equitable world. These tools strive to capture the lived experiences and material realities of multiply marginalized communities. Tools crafted by Black feminists to dismantle multiple forms of oppression remain invaluable to contemporary struggles for justice. The arsenal of Black women’s intellectual and cultural productions — which includes our theories, concepts, and expressions — contains some of the most viable and dynamic weapons in the war against inhumanity.

The labeling of intersectionality as a divisive concept is one of the many attacks on how we articulate and address the effects of social inequities and injustices on marginalized communities. Those who mobilized to #FreeTracy applied intersectionality to their demand for the dismissal of her murder charge, which finally happened in December 2022 — they highlighted how the criminal legal system fails to see violence against Black women. Crenshaw, and Black feminisms more broadly, offer means to interrogate how and why the combined force of racism and sexism operate in the lives of Black women and girls. Discarding or turning away from Black feminist concepts and theories weakens our collective opposition to white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, ableism, transphobia, queerphobia, colonialism, and imperialism.

As trite as it may sound, knowledge is a powerful weapon in the war against rising tides of Christo-fascism, transphobia, nativism, and white nationalism. Those behind anti-“woke” legislation and advocacy know that keeping students unaware of concepts and difficult histories is a good way of keeping oppressive structures and systems in place. Otherwise, why would this many state legislatures, school boards, and right-wing parents’ groups advocate for the banning of books by minoritized authors, the maligning of critical race theory, the firing of educators who teach about chattel slavery and Jim Crow, or the revising of textbooks to gloss over or ignore historical injustices? Organizations, clubs, campaigns, initiatives, and policies geared toward whitewashing, sanitizing, and erasing histories of inequity despise what Black feminism offers.

On the Freedom to Learn National Day of Action, collective actions will take place across the nation aimed at affirming the importance of equity and justice in all arenas of public life, but especially K-12 schools, college campuses, and workplaces. Supporters can sign an open letter about the importance of concepts such as intersectionality being taught, host an action in their local community, and amplify African American Policy Forum work on combating these attacks on knowledge and minoritized scholars and scholarship. There is both enduring efficacy of and untapped possibilities in vital tools proffered to us by Black feminism. May 3 will be a day of reckoning for the future of justice in this nation.